


The Vivisectionists

by Licoriceallsorts



Category: Compilation of FFVII, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M, Making Monsters, Science, science like your life depends on it, scientific rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 12:36:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2269935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Licoriceallsorts/pseuds/Licoriceallsorts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taken captive by the Engetsu, Hojo and Hollander must science to save their lives. Will Shinra arrived in time to save them, or will the green-eyed monster destroy them first?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vivisectionists

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClementRage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClementRage/gifts).



When his captors pulled the blindfold from Dr Nils Hollander's head and he saw who was sharing his cell, the first words that burst from his lips were, "Shit! Not you too?" He'd thought his situation couldn't get any worse.

            Professor Simon Hojo didn't look too happy about it either. Turning to their captors, he declared, "There's been some mistake."

            Three of the Crescent Unit operatives were dressed in battle gear: lamellar breastplates; baggy trousers embroidered in complicated patterns; shoes that looked like slippers, with curly, steel-tipped toes.  The fourth wore a poor facsimile of a Turk suit. He had already, and with some vigour, rubbed every trace of the sooty dot from his forehead. All four Engetsu were looking as unhappy as their two prisoners, but while Hollander's unhappiness was mostly fear, and Hojo's unhappiness was a kind of weary resignation to the ubiquitous inevitability of finding himself surrounded by fools, the unhappiness of the Wuteng was the sort a man might feel when ordered by his superiors to carefully handle and absolutely not damage something that would be, to any normal human, repugnant: a nest of maggots, say, or a dead sahagin.

            "No mistake," said the one in the fake Turk suit. "Our orders are kidnap Shinra's two top scientists."

            "Pfft," sniffed Hojo. "When a field holds only two tress, and one of them is an oak and the second is a puny sapling struggling to grow in the first one's shade, do you call them both the two _top_ trees?"

            "Koitsu wa nan to itta no," said one of the warriors.

            "Ahondara yo," snapped the fake Turk.

            "What are they saying?" asked Hollander.

            A certain look, not unfamiliar to Hollander, came into Hojo's eyes. Anyone who worked with the Professor for any length of time came to think of that loom as his "smile", although it really wasn't. He said, "They're wondering whether it would be less trouble to kill you now or to take you back where they found you."

            Hollander's pulse began to gallop in a most distracting manner. His bladder, all of a sudden, felt treacherously tight. "I don't want to die," he exclaimed. "Simon, please, tell them. Tell them I'll do anything. Whatever they want."

            Hojo turned to the Wuteng. "Jikisama ore ga jibun no heya wo yousuru," he said firmly.

            The fake Turk laughed. "Our Commander interrogates you later. You ask him then. For now, there is water, there are beds, there is pail for shitting. I bring new clothes. Stay clean, cockroaches." He locked the cell door and they left. When Hollander was sure they were out of earshot, he muttered "Flea," under his breath.

            There was no hope of escape. He'd seen that straight away. This cell was only one small part of a far larger network of caves, labyrinthine in its complexity; Hollander calculated he must have been frog-marched underground for at least half an hour, through half a dozen checkpoints; he'd lost count of the number of turnings they'd made. The whole set-up reminded him of the Binding Cages in his old lab back in Banora - although he conceded that the Wuteng had tried to make this cell, for want of a better word, _cosy_ : wooden pallets had been laid on the ground and rugs spread over them; the two beds had proper mattresses and sheets; the pail was actually a port-a-potty on which one could sit, and a painted screen had been provided. The lighting was quite soft; not a bad imitation of natural light, in fact. He wondered how they managed to power so many miles of cave without recourse to mako. Somewhere they must be running massive generators. Destroy those, and this whole complex would be plunged into darkness.  He only hoped Shinra would remember to get him out first.

            At the thought of being lost and abandoned underground in the pitch dark, a fit of claustrophobia seized him: he started hyperventilating, and sat down hard on the nearest bed, his eyes screwed shut and his hands over his eyes, aware that Hojo was watching him but unable to control himself.  If only he could faint! Unconsciousness would be a blessing right now. He didn't need to see Hojo's face to know what expression it would be wearing: that look of amused condescension was the Chief Scientist's trademark.

When at last the fit of terror had spent itself and Hollander was breathing normally again, Hojo spoke. "There appear to be several other cells, but they're all empty. We're the only ones here."

            "And it looks like they're planning on keeping us a while." Hollander couldn't decide whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.Good, probably; it meant he wasn't going to die straight away. "Where are we?" he wondered aloud. "Wutai?"

            "One could say so, in a manner of speaking," sniffed Hojo.

             Hollander ground his teeth. This was just the sort of aggravating thing his opposite number _would_ say; aggravating not only because of its cod-metaphysical tone but because it implied Hojopossessed the real answer and was choosing not to share it.  Back at the office he said such things all the time for no reason other than to entice Hollander into opaque, meandering arguments that generally ended with Hollander withdrawing from the field out of sheer exasperation and Hojo then acting like he'd won some kind of victory.  But it was all bogus: he probably had no more idea what these Wuteng wanted from them than Hollander did.

            "How did they get you?" Hojo asked, in what was, for him, quite a friendly manner.

            "That Woot - that fake Turk - came to pick me up at the office. I was going to a meeting. He had a limo. I thought he was legit."

            "We all look alike to you, I suppose?"

            "No," exclaimed Hollander indignantly, although it was true. Well, mostly true; he would have known Hojo anywhere; in the dark he would have known him, the very instant he heard that incredibly irritating little adenoidal sniff _,_ which in and of itself, Hollander believed, would be reason enough for murder. There had been times in the lab when he'd barely been able to restrain himself from ripping the nose right out of Hojo's face. _We claim justifiable homicide, m'lud: the balance of the accused's mind was disturbed by the deceased's unreasonable behaviour._

Shaking off these happy fantasies, Hollander said, "Anyway, you poseur, what's with the 'we'? I always thought you were half and half, aren't you? Like Veld's kid. Mine had that thing he's got, here - " Hollander pointed at Hojo's forehead. "That's how they tricked me. What's it mean, anyway?"

            "Shiseiji. Nokemono. Bastard."

            "Huh. He's in the right job then, eh? Marked out for it. Why don't you have one?"

            "My mother was the gaijin."

            Hollander didn't know what the word meant, and he wasn't about to give Hojo the satisfaction of asking.  "Uh. Right. I have to say, Simon, I'm kind of surprised you let yourself get captured."

            "Nobody captured me. I was offered the opportunity to participate in a project that would advance our understanding of the human body's physical potential. The project seemed... intriguing, if somewhat ill thought out."

            "So they suckered you with a fake project?"

            "Oh, it's not fake," said Hojo. "It's already begun."

            "You mean - ?" Hollander gasped as Hojo's words sunk in. "You're working for them?"

            "That is not a salient question." 

            "You traitor...."  

            The strength and depth of Hollander's contempt felt surprising even to himself: he hadn't realised how much it mattered. But - Shinra had given this piece of shit _everything_. All the accolades. All the prizes. Did the scum not know the meaning of the word gratitude? Was there no drop of loyalty running in those mixed-race veins of his? Well - but then again, what else could one expect from a half-breed? The company should have seen this coming.

            "Don't be banal," Hojo sniffed. "The President knows very well where my loyalties lie. That's precisely what makes me invaluable to him. If you straightened out your own priorities, you too might be able to elevate your work above the level of imitative mediocrity."

            "Nice turn of phrase, that. Imitative mediocrity. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, I remember - wasn't it what Gast wrote on your final evaluation?"

            He was wasting his breath and he knew it: Hojo had the thickest skin of any man alive. His indifference to the dislike of others was what had enabled him to forge his way to the top of a profession determined to hold him down. Instead of getting angry, he merely shrugged, and mildly replied, "Gast was wrong about quite a few things. He saw it himself, in the end."

            Hollander didn't doubt it. Their old Chief of Department had been incompetent in more ways than one - but he'd been dead for nigh on a decade now, and right now Hollander had more pressing matters to deal with. For a good two minutes he sat quietly with his hand over mouth, thinking hard. His first impulse had been to ask Hojo how much the Woots were paying him, but Hojo would have dismissed that (and quite rightly) as a frivolous question. This business they were both in had never been about the money. Shinra paid them more than any man could spend, for precisely this reason... Although if the company ever found out that their Chief Biologist and Head of Zoological Research had willingly defected to the enemy, the loss of his fat-ass salary would be the least of his worries.

            "They'll kill you for this," said Hollander. "Hunt you down and shoot you like they did with Gast."

            "No they won't. You _,_ on the other hand..."

            "I'm completely innocent. I was kidnapped. I'm here against my will."

            "Didn't I just hear you offering to cooperate with them?"

            "What? No! I mean, yes, you bastard, but only under duress. Force majeur doesn't count."

            Hojo smiled. "Tell that to the Turks."

.

            Food was brought on a laquer tray: rice, pickles, some kind of fish. Hollander fell asleep after eating. "Are you aware that you snore?" said Hojo when he woke up. Hollander had not known, but he was glad: it would be some small revenge for the sniff torture.  

            Neither of them had a watch or PHS or any means of telling the time; Hollander no longer knew whether it was day or night outside.             A long stretch of boredom passed, and then a high-ranking Engetsu officer came to visit them, flanked by various ADCs. He introduced himself as Commander Silver (a code name if ever Hollander had heard one), and asked which of them was responsible for the _akumabito_ , which was a word that even Hollander knew.  It was what the Wuteng called SOLDIER.

            "That is a stupid acronym," said Commander Silver. "It is confusing to call your elite fighting force by the same common noun used to describe members of the regular army."

            "That's exactly what I said," Hollander cried.

            "It would be as if I were to call my warriors WARRIOR. How does your President know which force he is sending out? 'Send soldiers', he says, and you send out your infantrymen, and he says, 'No, I said soldiers', and you say, 'but we sent soldiers'.  It's stupid. You people have no imagination; that is why you will lose this war."

            "I wanted to call them The Behemoths," said Hollander.

            "You are the one who made them?" Commander Silver's attention was now entirely focused on Hollander, who began to feel it had been a mistake to speak so freely. The Woot's expression was frankly hostile - and he was waiting, not very patiently, for an answer.  

            "I'm not sure that 'make them' would be the most accurate way of describing it," Hollander began cautiously. "One shouldn't really talk about human beings in those terms -  "

            "The patent for the process is owned by Shinra, Inc.," Hojo cut in.

            The Commander's assessing gaze transferred itself to the other scientist. "The ones we have captured tell us they are injected with magic and made to bathe in the Lifestream, which is a profanity."

            "Rank superstition. There's nothing 'magic' about it. The injections are genetic enhancements. Immersion in mako activates the enhancements. Skill levels develop through exercise and training."

            "You make them?"

            "I oversee the program."

            Commander Silver turned to Hollander. "You too?"

            "Me? No, no, no, that's all in the past, I have nothing to do with the SOLDIER program these days. Washed my hands of it."

            "What about the three shinigami?" the Commander asked Hojo. "The red one, the black one, and the silver one? You made them too?"

            "Yes," said Hojo.

            Thinking discretion the better part of valour, Hollander swallowed both his pride and the retort that sprang to his lips; now was hardly the time to call Hojo out on this bare-faced lie.

            The Commander snapped his fingers at Hollander, and said to his men, "We have no use for this one. Take him outside and kill him."

            "No!" Hollander cried, "No, wait - please. It's not true, what Simon just said. He's always claiming credit for breakthroughs that don't belong to him; he's never had an original idea in his life. The SOLDIER project is as much mine as it is his. More mine. Twice as much mine. Imade Genesis and Angeal. He made Sephiroth."

            "Who is stronger than both Genesis and Angeal combined," said Hojo.

            This was true, alas - but did the selfish fucker really have to point it out right at the precise moment when Hollander was pleading for his life?

            Commander Silver glanced from one scientist to the other, weighing them up; he had been a leader of his people for many years, and took the measure of most men swiftly. "I see," he said. "You are rivals."

            "A foolish notion of the previous head of our department," said Hojo, pushing his glasses up his nose.

            "There were two projects," said Hollander. "Mine and his. Our objective was to recreate the ancient race of the Cetra."

            "Fukanou - the Cetra died out millenia ago." Commander Silver's frown combined _that's the stupidest thing I ever heard_ with _you'd better not be fucking with me_ in a way that was so utterly intimidating that Hollander's anal sphincter momentarily threatened to abandon all its dignity.

            He felt compelled to defend himself. "It's true the race was believed to be extinct. But we found one. Our old Section Chief, Faremis Gast, he found her, frozen in the permafrost north of Icicle Inn, perfectly preserved. That is..." Hollander hesitated, picturing the blue mottled skin, the shrivelled wing, the singular eye-boob. "She's in an excellent state of preservation, considering her age."

            "She? A female? This is the mother of the shinigami?"

            "I don't know why you're asking these questions when it's perfectly obvious you are incapable of understanding the answers," said Hojo rather irritably. "If you really think a two thousand year old mummy would be capable of giving birth viviparously then you are an ignoramus. In layman's terms, I spliced her genes into an embryo and used a human incubator."

            "And so did I," Holland quickly added.

            "When you say 'human incubator', do you mean - a woman?"

            "A lab assistant," said Hollander.

            "My wife," said Hojo. 

            Commander Silver turned to address his warriors, "Hontou ni, kono sensou ni wa wareware ga jinrui no tame ni katanakereba naranai."

            Hollander began, "Hojo, what - "

            His rival sighed. "You know, Nils, it pains me to have to say this, but sometimes the chasm between ignorance and enlightenment is just too wide."

.

            With the preliminaries out of the way, Commander Silver got down to brass tacks. Wutai had kidnapped Shinra's scientists for a reason, and it was not to hold them to ransom. The Engetsu were being decimated by Shinra's human demons. Therefore Shinra's scientists, who best knew the weaknesses of their own creations, must make for the Engetsu a weapon capable of destroying the _akumabito_ they had unleashed upon the world.

            Hojo tittered when the Commander said this; someone who didn't know him might have mistaken his laugh for an attack of nerves.

            "Make us a demon of our own," said Commander Silver. "A demon-slaying demon.  If it is effective, we will let you live."

            "Sure, we can do that - " Hollander began.

            "Fight fire with fire?" interrupted Hojo. "The results would be... Unpredictable, and therefore interesting. If you can afford to wait fifteen or sixteen years, I suppose it wouldn't be completely impossible, with the right equipment."

            Hollander shot him a _shut up, stupid_ glare, but Hojo was oblivious.

            "You have six weeks," said Commander Silver.

            "Sure, we can do that," said Hollander, thinking that six weeks would be ample time for Shinra to find and rescue them.

            "If you're going to insist on such a truncated time-scale you'll have to adjust your expectations accordingly," said Hojo.

            "I understand more than you think," replied the Commander with a hint of his not-very-pleasant smile. "I studied at the Eastern Polytechnic before the war. You will need your frozen Cetra, yes? Where do you keep it? In Midgar?"

            It was at this point that Hollander became rather abruptly conscious of the danger of his position, poised on the brink of treachery, so to speak, the toes of his boots poking over the edge, dislodging pebbles that rattled down the precipitous canyon walls to strike tiny puffs of dust from the dry earth of the desert floor a thousand feet below. There were two great company secrets, and Jenova was one of them. Throats had been slit for even hinting that she existed. Throats had been slit on the mere suspicion that someone might know something that they might possibly drop a hint about at some unspecified future time.

            Should he deny all knowledge, and die now? Or blab what he knew and die when the Turks found him? It was a no-brainer: while there was life, there was hope.

            Before he could speak, Hojo stole the moment. "You'll find her in the rotunda of the Shinra Number One Reactor in Nibelheim. It's the door right at the back, at the top of the stairs. Give me a pen and I'll write down the entry code."

.

            Time passed, dismal and slow, while they waited for the Engetsu to bring them some Jenova cells. Nils Hollander lay on his bed, studying the sedimentary patterns in the rocky ceiling and pondering the injustices of life. The Engetsu had brought books, but only Hojo could read them. He had offered to read them aloud for his cell-mate, translating as he went. Thanks but no thanks, said Hollander. He'd had enough of his nose being rubbed in it. The topology of the ceiling had taken on for him the attributes of a three-dimensional map, complete with valleys, mountain ridges, plateaus, coastlines, all in miniature: he was imagining a world, peopling it with the kinds of beings he knew he could create if only he weren't forced to share the funding with Professor Wankstain Turncoat.

            The thing about Hojo, the really irritating thing, the thing that gave him his competitive edge - Hollander decided - was his _decisiveness_. Total lack of any doubt, self or otherwise, to the point of being almost sociopathic. Only almost? Yes; Hollander would grudgingly concede that Hojo's one saving grace was his willingness to admit when he'd made a mistake. More than willingness, in fact: when Hojo went wrong he was usually the first to see it, and would immediately call a halt to experiments that, as far as everyone else could see, were progressing just fine. Hojo had no qualms about writing off millions of Shinra's gil with a simple, "I was wrong", and seemed to derive as much pleasure from his failures as from his successes.

            Fear of making a mistake had never caused him to hesitate. It was this fearlessness that made him decisive, and his decisiveness enabled him to act quickly, while Hollander dithered, weighing up his options. Now, when it was too late, he saw that _he_ should have been the one to give the Engetsu Commander the information on Jenova's whereabouts. Not only would he have gained himself a modicum of goodwill from someone who held the power of life and death over him, he might also have earned a little respect: the Woots would have realised he was someone who possessed both knowledge and authority. As it was, he had the sinking feeling they thought he was Hojo's assistant.

            Of course, when Shinra came to the rescue - and he had every expectation that this would happen sooner rather than later; surely, surely they would not leave their two most valuable scientists to languish in the hands of the enemy for any longer than was absolutely necessary  - he would be able with a clear conscience to tell the Turks that his own lips had been sealed: it was that fink flea Hojo who'd given their most classified of secrets away. But what if - as was likely - the Turks didn't care to make that nice distinction? What if they decreed him guilty by association? Out in the field the Turks were judge, jury and executioner, and Piet Veld had never hidden his dislike of the Jenova project. Just look at how easily he'd let Ifalna and her sprog slip through his fingers! There was no way Hollander would ever believe that hadn't been an deliberate act of sabotage on Veld's part. The Chief Turk was the type to shoot first and make perfunctory apologies to the President later, and so it seemed to the fretting Hollander that he was likely to suffer all the consequences of being associated with treason without enjoying any of its benefits.

            And he knew, he just bloody knew, because it was the story of his fucking life, that if it came down to a choice - if only one of them was going to be saved by a company greedy for scientific progress, it wasn't going to be him.  Dr Nils Hollander was _expendable_.  

            He blamed Angeal and Genesis. Maybe he was being unfair, but then, life was unfair, wasn't it? He'd endowed those two with powers and abilities far beyond those of most mortal men - Shiva's tits, was that a line from _Loveless_? Anyway - yes, he, Nils Hollander, master geneticist, paterfamilias, demiurge, through his hard work and genius, his sweat and tears and sacrifice, had gifted them with greatness, and how had they repaid him? By being second-rate.

.

            The team of ninjas sent to raid the Nibelheim reactor were annihilated almost to the last man by two Shinra _akumabito_ and the black-clad shinigami; the last man was spared to bring word of this disaster back to his people. Commander Silver did not trouble to hide his anger as he broke the news to the Shinra scientists.  Once again Hollander felt the desperate urge to void his bladder; his heart was pounding so violently he couldn't have spoken if he tried.  Without Jenova cells, they couldn't make SOLDIERs, and if they couldn't make SOLDIERs their captors would have no further use for them.

            But Hojo, who appeared to completely lack the instinct for self-preservation that governed most normal human beings, said, "Commander, this is most disappointing. I even gave you the door codes. I could hardly have made it any easier. You told me your ninjas were highly trained. Surely you must have anticipated that the company would protect its assets? Having failed to defeat our SOLDIERs before, you can't have supposed the outcome would be any different this time."

            Hollander expected - hoped - prayed - to see the Woot warlord take Hojo by the throat and shake him like a rat until his neck snapped.  But Commander Silver bore the scientist's rebuke quite meekly. Maybe he really did blame himself for the deaths of his men. That seemed to be a thing with army types.  And, as Hollander knew from personal experience, Hojo's refusal to take account of human feelings, or even acknowledge that such feelings existed, tended to exert a powerfully deflating effect on the spirits of anyone who tried to confront him.

            Their conversation now switched into Wuteng, and Hollander could take no more part in it. He had to wait until Commander Silver and his entourage had departed to learn that Hojo had struck a new deal with their captors, and that they were now going to make anti-SOLDIER biological weapons for the Engetsu out of whatever materials were to hand. Apparently Commander Silver had agreed that they could each have a lab of their own; moreover, he'd said that these labs were already fully equipped and ready to go. "We'll split the available specimens fifty-fifty," said Hojo.

            "You agreed to all this in my name without consulting me?"

            "Your input would have prolonged the discussion without altering its outcome. In any case, I am still, if only technically, given our current situation, your line manager. We can make a little competition out of it. If nothing else, it'll help pass the time."

            "Simon, why are you doing this? Have you given up hope that Shinra will rescue us?"  If Hojo, the eternal optimist, had lost hope, then there really was nothing left to do but despair - and collaborate.

            Hojo pondered the question for a full five minutes. Finally, and long after Hollander's own thoughts had moved on to something else, he said, "When they first brought you here, I could see you weren't pleased to see me. I would have been foolish to take that personally, of course; you and I have never been friends. But surely you appreciate now how fortunate you are to have me as your fellow prisoner? The company needs me. They'll come for me. It's only a matter of time."

            "So you're playing for time?" That actually made sense.

            Hojo frowned. "I don't _play_ with science. I hypothesize, run experiments to test my hypotheses, and make observations. That's what scientists _do_ , Nils. Must I spell this out for you? We've been given a unique opportunity here, but instead of making the most of it, all you can think of is how to escape from it.  And then you wonder why the headship of our department eluded you. I have every confidence that Shinra will come for me, and when they do, I intend to be ready. You can too. I've done my best to level the playing field. Now, it's up to you."

.          

            It took three days for the Wuteng to finish equipping the labs to Hojo's specifications. He had spoken the truth when he said he'd levelled the playing field: Hollander tried in vain to find fault with the arrangements, but the two labs were identical in every respect, containing all the equipment they could possibly need. Once he'd finished inspecting his new kingdom, his captors led him to another part of the cave complex, closer to the entrance; he could smell fresh air, and also animal dung, both chocobo and monster. They came into a wide, low cavern where pens had been built out of wicker hurdles. Most contained chocobos, but the four in the farthest corner each housed a monster. "You can have any two," said Commander Silver. "Your colleague has allowed you first choice."

            _Oh, he has, has he?_ Condescending prick. Well, fine: if Hojo was stupid enough to flaunt his vanity, Hollander wasn't above taking advantage of it.

            The monsters on offer were an eclectic collection: a mangy grimguard, a foulander bitch pup, a baby adamantoise, and a sad, listless madouge. The grimguard had a certain native intelligence, but little in the way of real power, either physical or magical. The madouge was just pathetic. Stripped of its demonic battle-gear, the foulander was just another breed of guard hound, but it did have a fire attack to which unWalled humans were particularly vulnerable. If he could combine it with the adamantoise's defensive capabilities, enhance all its stats, and build some truly powerful attacks into its innate elemental affinities, he might just come up with something interesting....

            It was only that night, as Hollander lay in bed listening to Hojo quietly chuckling over the notes he was writing up (in Wuteng, the bastard), that he began to doubt whether the choices he'd made had been the right ones. But it was too late to change his mind.

.

            The next morning, he began by making a series of cell cultures from various tissues in the adamantoise's anatomy. Standard practice would have been to kill the subject once he'd harvested what he needed - but you never knew, the little creature might come in useful later. It wasn't taking up much space, yet, and it couldn't run fast enough to get away. So he let it live. It spent most of its time asleep in a corner of the lab, all four legs and head drawn tightly inside its shell. 

            Hollander injected various solutions of adamantoise cells into other cell cultures taken from the foulander and watched them battle it out under the microscope. This was the thrilling, nail-biting part, when you never knew what would happen, and if you so much as blinked you risked missing something vital. Once he was sure he understood what he was working with, he began a series of injections directly into the foulander pup. He'd chosen the hound as the receptor specimen for several reasons. Firstly, agility was an asset in an attack weapon; the adamantoise was a tank. More crucially, an adamantoise in its natural state took three centuries to reach maturity. Even with the mako-acclerated growth process, Hollander would grow old and die before any tortoise he produced was battle-worthy. So the hound it had to be.

            Improving on nature was work a man could lose himself in. For hours at a time Hollander would forget that he was a captive, forget that his life was in danger, forget that he was once again pitted in a struggle for supremacy with a rival who held all the cards; he forgot that he was committing a crime that could lead to a death sentence, against which there would be no appeal.

            But once the splicing was completed and the various nerve fibres re-routed for optimal response time, when the last injections had been given, and the materia had been implanted, and the catheters inserted, and the pup had been introduced to the mako tank and haste had been cast, then there was nothing to do but wait, and nothing to fill the time but his own glum thoughts.

            It humiliated him, how much he wanted to win this. Compared to the all the other prizes Hojo had snatched from his grasp - headship of the department, public accolades, victory in the Jenova project, and above all, that Crescent girl, which from a layman's perspective might look like the least of his victories, but was in fact, Hollander had come to realise, the fount from which all the others had sprung - winning this petty little battle of wits wouldn't amount to much more than a consolation prize. Their captors would probably kill them anyway, as soon as their work was complete, and if their captors didn't kill them, Shinra would. But even so. If he had to die, then he wanted to die a winner.

             Years of his life had been spent trying to figure out what it was that made Sephiroth superior to his own two First Class SOLDIERs.  Because if you looked at it from a different angle - the layman's angle, Gillian's angle - then Angeal was undoubtedly the better man: not only was he virtually indestructible on the battlefield, but also brimful of those good qualities Gillian had insisted on instilling in him: honour, generosity, patience, loyalty, compassion, et cetera. A son any mother could be proud of, and she _was_ proud of him, and the boy knew it.

            That had been the deal: she would only agree to bear the child if he allowed her to raise it. She'd never taken a penny from him. Now that the hick she'd married out of spite was dead, she got by on her Shinra pension. It was her way of claiming ownership of the boy. Legally, he had no rights. The birth certificate said _father unknown_.

            Her deep and abiding resentment of him was something he'd never been able to fathom. He'd given her the kid, hadn't he? And it wasn't as if he'd raped her. You might just as well say that she'd raped him. She'd never been a looker (not like Hojo's sassy little human incubator in her high heels and her flirty skirts) and he'd never been remotely attracted to her either before or since, but somehow, that day in the lab, with the freshly-injected Cetra cells swirling about in her veins, she'd had this irresistible _glow_ about her, and he'd been swept away by the most incredible, overwhelming, animal urge to bend her over the dissecting table and shag her senseless - and whatever she might say now, at the time she'd been affected as badly as he, throwing herself on him like a cat in heat, literally ripping his clothes off. It had been over in minutes, but to this day he remembered it fondly as the most intense fuck he'd ever had.

            Because she'd signed a contract, she was unable to prevent him injecting the various post-shag samples he'd taken from her body into the pregnant (but very healthy, he'd done his due diligence) thirteen-year-old he'd acquired from Don Corneo.  She did, however, threaten to get an abortion, and after thinking it over he'd decided that really it would be a dreadful waste to flush all that fine genetic material down the toilet. So they'd come to their arrangement. It had seemed more practical to keep the two boys together, and she wasn't averse to moving to Banora; quite keen on it, in fact. "We can raise them like brothers," she'd said, which had struck him as a typically Gillianish, sentimental kind of thing to say. He had not then foreseen the harm her attitude would do.

            Hojo had once accused him of lacking imagination, and sometimes Hollander was forced to wonder if he might be right.  It had never occurred to him to give his test subjects anything other than a normal upbringing. He let them have mothers; he let the mothers raise them; he let them have father figures too, and kept his distance, maintaining a watching brief. It was only from watching Hojo raise Sephiroth that he had come to realise just how much control he had surrendered, and the more he thought about it, the more clearly he understood that nurture, not nature, was to blame for his failure.

            His science had been flawless. Genetically, Angeal and Genesis were in no way inferior to Sephiroth. But their mothers had raised them like ordinary children. They had had friends, played games, raided orchards, gone to school, tended pets, enjoyed hobbies. Soft loving hands had stroked their brows when they fell ill with childhood fevers. And what was the end result of all this coddling? Angeal was humane to the point of weakness, not to mention stingy with money. Genesis was a self-indulgent fruitcake with an obsession for bad poetry. Neither of them possessed Sephiroth's single-mindedness, or his absolute certainty of his purpose in the world. Those two wanted _more_ , always more, more whatever, love, life, variety, the fuck knows what.  They _diffused_ themselves.

            Hojo had gone about it the right way. He hadn't put himself to the trouble of negotiating with his rent-a-womb. First he'd married her, guaranteeing himself a legal authority over the offspring of her flesh, and once she'd served her purpose, he'd killed her. At least, Hollander assumed that was what he had done. For one thing, it was the standard experimental protocol, and for another, no one had ever seen her again after Sephiroth was born; and for a third, there was that death certificate: _killed in the line of the duty._ Hojo had told Gast that Lucretia had accidentally pricked herself with an infected syringe, which had made Hollander snicker quietly to himself in  his corner, because it was true. Except for the part about it being an accident, of course.

.

            That night Hojo looked up from the notes he was scribbling to comment, "These people are such hypocrites."

            Hollander, who had been fighting a mighty battle in his imagination between the two great rival states of his ceiling civilisation, came back to earth and asked, "Comment is apropos of....?"

            "He said bathing in 'the Lifestream' was a profanity. Yet when I told him we needed mako tanks to produce their weapons, he let us have them without question. Like all religious people, the Wuteng are more than ready to abandon their so-called principles when it's convenient for them."

            "You'd think they'd be afraid Leviathan would strike them dead, or something."

            "They see their failures as a proof of their moral insufficiency. Then they try to correct their failures by being better people, rather than better at what they do. That is the fundamental flaw in the religious mindset."

            Hollander was not inclined to disagree. He didn't really find the topic interesting, to be honest.

            What he didn't say -what neither of them ever said - was _so, your experiment, how's it going?_  It had been tacitly agreed that the project was not a subject for discussion. Anyway, Hollander didn't need to ask. He could tell by Hojo's aura of smug satisfaction that things were going just fine, dammit. Damn it. He really, really wanted to win this.

.

            After three weeks of acceleration in the mako-tank, Hollander's weapon was mature and ready for testing. The Engetsu drained the tank, put a collar and leash around the hound's neck, put a pair of handcuffs round Hollander's wrists, and led them both, monster and scientist, to a large echoing cavern in another part of the cave complex, where something that resembled a bull-ring or a cock-fighting pit had been dug out of the sandy floor and fenced with panels of solid wood. Commander Silver and a handful of his warriors were standing on the far side of the pit, right beside a gate that connected the pit with a holding ring containing five very riled, aggressive Coast Runners.

            The Engetsu handler released Hollander's creature into the ring. She stood alert, ears pricked, to all outwards appearances an ordinary foulander hound, except for that very faint, tell-tale hint of blue in the eyes which perhaps only Hollander could see. Commander Silver didn't look impressed. He made a chopping gesture, and one of the Engetsu raised the gate, while two others used their spear tips to prod the first of the Coast Runners into the fighting pit.

            The bird fluffed its feathers and began to trot in a circle round the edge of the ring. The foulander remained motionless, following the bird with her eyes.

            "She won't move until you give the word," Hollander told the handler.

            "Sou desu ka. Kougeki!"

            The air curdled with energy: colours bleached to white, shapes blurred; the light grew so bright Hollander had to cover his eyes, and when the Flare had faded and he was able to look again, nothing was left of the Coast Runner but a little pile of greasy ash, a few floating feathers, and some charred chips of bone.

            "Tsugoi," murmured the Engetsu.

            Two more Coast Runners were sent into the ring. "Mamot-te," said the handler. The foulander cast a Wall around herself, and though the two birds launched a coordinated attack, taking turns to viciously peck and kick, neither bear nor claw could penetrate the hound's defense.

            "Kougeki!" cried the handler. At once the foulander began to cast Tri-Fire uninterruptedly, burning the birds to a crisp and singeing the tips of Hollander's eyebrow hairs.

            "She'll learn to control her casts," he called across at Commander Silver. "She just needs practice."

            The impassivity had been wiped from Silver's face, replaced by a look halfway between horror and awe. He motioned for the last two Coast Runners to be brought in. The foulander, excited by the smell of burnt flesh and by all the dispersed energy charging the atmosphere, quivered from nose to tail, yet retained sufficient self-control to wait for her handler's command before launching herself upon them.

            With her claws and teeth she tore the birds to shreds and ate them, down to the last feather, with an alacrity and a thoroughness that Hollander found profoundly satisfyingly on both a professional and personal level.  There was no way Hojo could beat this.  No way. It would take more than a couple of first Third Classes to lay _this_ baby low. An intelligent First Class - Angeal, say - might be able to outmaneuver her, but regular soldiers would stand no chance against her speed, her defensive buffs, and her high level energy spells: one round of her Ultima or Flare could incinerate an entire platoon.

            And he had made her. His hands had created this weapon. Not nature. Not the Lifestream, not Leviathan, not the goddess. He, Nils Hollander, scientist: he had dreamed her, built her, given her life.

            He couldn't stop grinning.

            "Anou, toriaezu mochisayo," snapped Commander Silver. The Engetsu handler slipped the leash through the foulander's collar and led her from the ring. His own handler took Hollander by the arm, but he wasn't ready to leave: he could see that five fresh birds were being herded into what he'd come to think of as the victims' pen, and he knew this meant that Hojo's specimen was about put through its pace.

            "Commander," he called, "Let me stay, please?"

            Commander Silver shrugged. "Why not?"

            Hollander heard Hojo's creature approaching before he saw it - and felt it too, a weighty presence, its footsteps making the ground shake. He was thus mentally prepared for the incarnation of brute force that presently shuffled into view, closely followed by its creator. It was vaguely humanoid in shape, in the same way that a madouge was humanoid; bipedal, its upper body vast, muscular, broad-shouldered out of all proportion to its tiny bandy legs; hide hairless and tough like cured leather; head minute; face simian, expressionless. Each of its two hands had four fingers and an opposable thumb. The right hand clutched a mace. Around its waist it wore an embroidered loincloth, incongruously demure.  What was that loincloth supposed to be hiding? Was this thing an animal or wasn't it?

            Hojo's face, blandly bored, was not the place to look for answers. Like Hollander, he was handcuffed, but unlike Hollander he managed to convey the impression that his shackles were irrelevant, a minor nuisance that he tolerated because objecting would be frivolous.  _You cannot_ , he would say, _chain minds._

            One by one the birds were released into the fighting pit, and one by one the creature bludgeoned them to death. Hojo had not equipped it with materia. It had nothing in the way of buffs. Its reaction time was slow, its movements so predictable one might think it had been programmed to follow a pattern.  About the only thing it had going for it was its strength. Thwack, thwack, thwack went its mace, until the spikes were clogged with gobbets of downy flesh. Hollander would have bet his entire annual salary on it not lasting five minutes against his own beautiful, magical bitch - and when all the birds were dead, he raised his voice to suggest as much. "Why don't we pit the specimens against each other now? Mano-a-mano, as they say in Costa del Sol?"

            That sanctimonious arsewipe Silver refused to even consider it. "Do you think you are at the chocobo races? Both these creatures are valuable to us; we will not waste them in idle sport. They performed well today, but they still need training, and we have yet to see whether they can prevail against your akumabito. When that day comes, if they succeed, you will live. If they fail, you will die. In the meantime, I will assign some people to you, and you will instruct them in the methods for producing these creatures. Hitojichi wo katazukete," he dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

            Back at the cell Hollander flung himself down onto his bed with a groan of frustration. "Shiva's fucking tits. We're their slaves. That's what we've been reduced to. Slave fucking labour. Chained hand and foot."

            "Work is work," said Hojo, sitting down and opening his notebook.

            "We're never getting out of here, are we?"

            "You should have more faith in your handiwork," Hojo rebuked him mildly. "I'm afraid I wasn't able to see your specimen perform, but I heard she was impressive.  Flare _and_ Ultima. The nec plus ultra of overkills. I think our Commander friend is very pleased with you."

            "Shit!" Hollander cried. Eyes wild, he sat up, clutching his throat as if he were choking. "Shit, Simon! I've just realised what we've done. We've created anti-SOLDIER weapons. We've made it impossible for Shinra to rescue us now. Fuck. Fuck.  What idiots we've been."

            "Speak for yourself," Hojo murmured, turning a page.

.

            Hollander was in his lab three days later, demonstrating to his two new assistants (one of which was a rather attractive, bright young woman) the correct volumetric analysis method for titrating mako concentrations in the blood of lizard-type monsters, when he heard what sounded like a fight breaking out somewhere in the distance. Thinking little of it (he was in an army encampment, after all) he continued with his demonstration. The noises grew louder: scufflings, gun-shots, the ring of steel. Screams. His two assistants looked at each other fearfully. Then they both looked at him, and there was death in their eyes. He couldn't run. For one thing, there was nowhere to run to; for another, the door was locked from the outside; and for a third, there was a very heavy iron ball about the size of a watermelon attached to his right ankle by three feet of mithril chain.  He grabbed a scalpel in his right hand, and the neck of a conical flask in his left. Nils Hollander might be a man of science, but he had no intention of going down without a fight.

            The two assistants began to rise from their stools, drawing knives from under their lab coats, but as they did so, a violent explosion rocked the cave and all three of them were thrown to the ground.

            The door burst open. Four Engetsu warriors in full battle armour stood crowded in the doorway, naked blades in hand. "Kill him," they shouted.

            "No!" Hollander cried. "Your Commander promised - "

            Something dark loomed behind them; something silvery fanned out like a great white wing. Steel flashed, and all four of their heads popped off like - well, like celebratory corks from bottles bursting with blood instead of champagne. Hollander felt the hot blood splash across his face, stinging his eyes. Sephiroth - for it was he; the fan of silver was his hair - stepped over the dead bodies and stabbed one of Hollander's lab assistants through the chest; for years to come, the memory of that young man writhing like fishing bait on the skewer of Sephiroth's masamune would be for Hollander the stuff of nightmares.

            Sephiroth would have killed the girl too, had Angeal, who was right behind him, not stayed his hand. "Oh, thank god!" Hollander cried.

            Angeal picked the girl up with one hand, put her in the empty mako tank and locked it. "You'll be safe there," he said. Sephiroth used his foot to push the dead lab assistant from his sword and then cut Hollander free of his mithril bonds. "Are you all right?" said Angeal. "Can you walk?"

            "Where's the Professor?" said Sephiroth - and though Hollander knew it was beyond ridiculous, he couldn't help feeling pleased that _he_ was the one to be rescued first. Even if the boys hadn't planned it that way.

            Suddenly the two SOLDIERs froze like startled cats, every sense on full alert. Hollander strained to hear what they were hearing. Angeal sought Sephiroth's gaze, and raised his eyebrows meaningfully. Sephiroth smiled. "Something new?" he said.

            Faintly in the distance Hollander could hear the roar of a monster. It was coming closer.

            "It's not my fault," he cried. "I had nothing to do with it, I swear. Hojo forced me. He's the one who collaborated with them, not me. I don't even speak their language..."

            When the creature finally lumbered into sight, Angeal burst out laughing, and even Sephiroth indulged in what might be described as a chuckle. The thing was so bulky, and so top-heavy, and the rocky tunnel was so narrow, that it could barely squeeze through, let alone wield its mace. The knuckles of its malformed arms scraped along the ground; its pin head bumped the ceiling. Its yellow, piggy eyes glowed with malice.

            "What's it wearing?" laughed Angeal.

            "Don't underestimate it," Hollander warned them.  "Hojo made it."

            "Do you want the honours?" Angeal asked Sephiroth.

            Sephiroth graciously inclined his head. "Please, be my guest."

            Angeal dashed up the tunnel, ducked under the creature's fist, sent it staggering backwards with a punch to the heart, then grabbed its horns and twisted, snapping its neck.

            "The Professor likes his little jokes," said Sephiroth. "Well, Doctor Hollander, shall we go?"

            Every Engetsu they passed on the way out was either dead or dying. Hollander kept his eyes peeled for Commander Silver, but was disappointed. When they came to the large cavern where the fighting pit was located, they found Hojo sitting on an outcrop of rock with his notebook open on his lap and Genesis engaged in a sparring match with Hollander's foulander bitch, absorbing her fire attacks and sending them back to her. She was - and Hollander could scarcely believe his eyes - wagging her tail, leaping in the air to catch his fireballs.

            "Look at this adorable puppy," Genesis called out when he saw his friends. "I'm going to call her Firaga. Can we take her home with us, Angeal?"

            "She _is_ cute," Angeal agreed, kneeling down to scratch her under the chin. "But it would be cruel to take her to Midgar. The city's no place for pets. You'd have to keep her chained up the whole time."

            "I could send her to my parents in Banora."

            "Gen, be realistic. There's no room for her in the helicopter. Anyway, she'd probably burn the village down."

            "But I _want_ her - "

            "Nils will make you another one," said Hojo, shutting his notebook and rising to his feet. "Boys, if you're finished here, could we get going? I'm anxious to see how my department has been faring in my absence."

            Sephiroth led the way; Genesis and Angeal brought up the rear. Hojo and Hollander, walking side by side, formed the intellectual filling of this Shinra sandwich. They passed many dead bodies, picked their way round many pools of blood, climbed over many piles of broken and sorched rock, and neither of them spoke until the first glimmer of daylight became visible at the end of the tunnel; it was as if Hollander needed to see the sunshine before he could truly believe that their ordeal was at an end.  Turning to Hojo, he said, "You know, I really was afraid they'd never get us out of here."

            "I've told you before," Hojo sniffed, "You should have more faith in your work, Nils."           

**Author's Note:**

> This appears to have got rather longer than I intended. A bit of a monster, perhaps?
> 
> I wouldn't normally insert foreign languages into a fantasy fic, especially one I don't speak well. However, since this fic is told from Hollander's point of view, and he's in the situation of not understanding his captors' speech, my choices were to either gloss over the Wuteng lines, invent a language for them, or use one I knew already. Skipping over the Wuteng portion of the dialogue would not have conveyed Hollander's experience being excluded from a circle of communication to which Hojo belongs; I'm no Tolkien, and French and German just didn't seem right for Wutai, so I plumped for Japanese. I'm well aware that my Japanese is far from perfect, pretty crappy TBH, so I make no claims for it sounding authentic. Anyway... What they're saying (or supposed to be saying) is this:
> 
> Warrior: koitsuwa nan to itta no? : What did this guy say?  
> Fake Turk: ahondara yo: he's an idiot  
> Hojo: Jikisama ore ga jibun no heya wo yousuru: I demand a room of my own immediately.  
> Commander Silver:  
> fukanou: impossible  
> hontou ni, kono sensou ni wa wareware ga jinrui no tame ni katanakereba naranai: In truth, we have to win this war for the sake of humanity.
> 
> Anyone who actually speaks Japanese and would like to correct me is absolutely encouraged to do so!


End file.
